In many ways, wildlife and wildlife work
is an enigma to most people. I've been told "you're going to be killed"
when people saw me interacting with wildlife since my days of catching
watersnakes in Gee Creek that ran behind my central Florida home. The
reality is we wildlife workers, like outdoors people everywhere, are usually
in far more danger on the road than in the field and humans are the most
dangerous animal we face in any habitat. In
Job-Related Mortality of Wildlife Workers in the United States, 1937-2000,
D. Blake Sasse summarizes our job-related deaths in standard scientific
fashion in the peer-reviewed Wildlife Society Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 4.
(Winter, 2003), pp. 1015-1020.